Introduction to Facebook ads

With any type of advertising, the more relevant the ads are to your audience, the more successful your advertising campaigns will be. Facebook has a lot of targeting options that you'll definitely want to try. Let's go over them The most widely used targeting option is Location.

With this, you'll identify cities, countries, and even neighborhoods where you want to do business. For example, if you're a local business, you can show your ad only to people who are within five miles of your store. Next up we have Demographics. And here you'll choose the audience for your ad based on criteria such as age, gender, or education. For example, you could create a different ad to appeal to a different age group or even gender. Now those are fairly broad, so let's take a look at more specific targeting options. You'll spend a lot of time using Interests, and this is what makes Facebook advertising so effective. With interest targeting, you'll reach people based on their interests, hobbies, and even pages they like on Facebook. For example, if you sell Volvos, you can reach people who follow the Volvo Club Facebook page or fans of Volvo on YouTube, and anyone who's identified as an enthusiast of Volvo. Facebook collects a lot of information to create these user profiles including pages you've liked on Facebook, comments you've left, and even websites you visited, all in order to provide very accurate interest-targeting to their advertisers. In addition to Interests, you have the option of targeting based on Behaviors. You can target people based on purchase habits, device usage, and even recent life events. For example, app developers can reach people who are early adopters or who use a specific type of phone. Behavior targeting is often not as cut-and-dry and Interest targeting so beware of that when using in campaigns. The next targeting option is Connections. With this, you'll be able to reach people who are connected to your page, event, or application, as well as their friends. You might use this if you're promoting an event by showing ads to the friends of friends who've already RSVP'd on Facebook. Another really powerful feature is the Custom Audiences targeting option. As you become more and more advanced with your Facebook advertising, you'll want to take advantage of these custom audiences. You'll create custom audiences based on your own customer data. This includes emails, phone numbers, or user IDs. So you'll upload a list of e-mail addresses, for example, and then Facebook will identify their Facebook account and show your ad just to them. A good example of this would be sharing a customized ad with people who have already purchased a product from you before and you're simply upselling them. Whatever your goal with advertising, Facebook likely has a targeting option that will work best for you.